5 Questions to Consider About Your User Adoption Strategy

Billions of dollars are spent every year on initiatives and tools focusing on collecting leads and communicating with prospects. But as business models have evolved to a subscription-driven sale, the power and the impact have clearly shifted from the prospect to the customer.

“A healthy, growing SaaS company with -5% churn has 73% higher revenue than one with 5% churn.” — Tomasz Tunguz

Now don’t get me wrong, getting that initial sale is still critical and not an effort that is going away any time soon. However, a one-time sale doesn’t guarantee long-term customer loyalty, and, as the bar for what makes a great customer experience has been raised (and continues to rise), that loyalty is fragile. Any subscription buyer will tell you their business must be earned month after month, year after year. Customers expect a more personal experience with a product that meets them not just where they are, but where they want you to be.

Most companies approach this by spending a majority of their budget and focusing most of their efforts on gaining new clients. But you lose out on the full revenue potential if those customers churn because they never discover the full value of your solution. We call that a “leaky bucket“—filling your bucket is challenging if there are holes in your strategy.

Instead, consider a focus on getting your users to successfully adopt your product so they have strong foundations on which to build a confident and exceptional user experience. A great adoption strategy well help you deliver more WOW moments to your users, shorten their time-to-value, and ultimately create more advocates.

5 Questions to Ask as You Formulate or Evaluate Your User Adoption Strategy

Whether you’re building your adoption strategy from scratch or developing ways to elevate your current strategy, there are five questions we encourage you to consider.

What are the most important features that help my customers find value?

Ensuring your customers find value in your product is a top concern for most organizations because it’s shown to mitigate churn and create more advocates for your product. But, do you know which features are most valuable to your users’ needs? Unfortunately, most businesses can’t answer this question.

Identifying these top product features (or user flows) and the specific outcomes they create for your users is critical to understand why they are your customer in the first place, so you can do more of what matters. This will help you prioritize product roadmaps, increase time-to-value, accelerate onboarding, and create more successful customers in the long-run.

Are my customers adopting those features today?

If your customers aren’t adopting your most important features, then they probably aren’t getting the value they deserve from your product. Inability to adopt key features that are relevant to their business needs is one of the top reasons customers churn. By collecting data on your user’s feature adoption, you can be more proactive in ensuring their success.

Better visibility on product usage also allows your customer success and product teams to detect and analyze both sudden and gradual drops in product adoption so they can create engagements that guide customers in the right direction or reach out to users who may need help.

Can I incorporate this data into a meaningful customer health score?

When you know which features in your product are most important and whether your customers are adopting them successfully, you can use that information to inform health scores for your users for an at-a-glance look at the health of your customer base. This customer health score view can help your team stay proactive against potential churn.

Aggregating the data you have into a health score while also being able to drill down into the specific indicators that inform that score means you have a more meaningful and comprehensive profile of each user as well as how that relates to your customer base as a whole.

Here are some of the datapoints we think are important to consider in your health scoring:

Login Activity is based on the frequency of logins which helps to identify underperforming accounts and determine whether targeted engagement campaigns are needed to boost login frequency.

Feature Adoption is based on the number of unique features that each user within an account is using within the product. This lets product managers and customer success teams know if intervention is necessary to help users to discover core features or adopt new ones and can allow product or customer marketers understand key features to promote.

Technical Support is calculated based on the number of support tickets that are fulfilled and closed by an account or user. Support needs and requests can have a big impact on customer health, particularly due to severity and time to response.

Financial Health is measured by a customer’s monthly rate, whether payments are made on time or delayed, and the validity of the account’s credit card. This indicator is often not equally weighted to the others, but knowing that a customer’s credit card is going to expire or that their account is up for renewal lets you be proactive in outreach that could prevent unnecessary churn.

If product usage is low, can I drive user behavior towards desired outcomes?

Collecting data around usage that’s tied to each customer, segment, and user gives you a solid starting point to understanding how users are interacting with your product. As you collect that data, you may notice that users aren’t taking the actions required to meet their goals or business outcomes, which directly impacts their overall success with your product. To adjust and guide user behaviors, you’ll need a variety of campaign types that allow you to engage your users and point them in the right direction for their needs. Even better, you may also want to trigger a personalized “High-Five” or “Congratulations!” campaign to celebrate and acknowledge when a user completes a positive action.

Seeing the gaps between product usage and engagement can also lead you to identify aspects of your onboarding experience that may need work. It then becomes easier to tailor your customer success strategy with adequate touchpoints—both high-tech and high-touch—and proactively anticipate issues that may affect product usage.

Can I conduct a comprehensive “Voice of the Customer” program?

Being able to use the data you’re collecting toward a specific action, like getting a pulse on the voice of your customers, is the ultimate goal. Understanding not only how users are using your product but also how they feel about using your product will help you make better product decisions, adjust processes, and keep your users’ success at the core of your business.

Customer feedback is invaluable for you to stay ahead of market trends and conduct data-driven product iteration that best suits user needs. Additionally, customers who know you’re listening to them feel more committed to your product — using it, staying subscribed, and speaking positively of you to their friends and colleagues. You can collect their thoughts in-app with contextualized customer surveys, like after they used a specific feature or once they’ve completed one or more milestones in their customer journey.

Want to see how UserIQ can help you answer each of these questions and get your users successfully adopting your product? Schedule a demo with UserIQ!

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